The unfinished draft

American mythmaking may still conceal the true details of the killing of Osama bin Laden :

Mark Bowden was watching a ballgame on 1 May 2011, when the network cut away to President Obama in the East Room of the White House. "Tonight," the president said: ''I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda and a terrorist who's responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children.''

Five minutes or so after the president wrapped up his brief remarks, as thousands of Americans gathered in front of the White House and at ground zero chanting ''USA!''

Mark Boweden had his phone ringing soon. It was Mike Stenson, the President of Jerry Bruckheimer Films inviting Bowden to do a script on the 'bin Laden thing.'

Bowden said, count him in.

The next day, Stenson called back: Bruckheimer had changed his mind.

A book on bin Laden

Bowden considered for a second and decided he would write a book instead. In some ways, it was a perfect match of author and subject. Bowden specializes in chronicling covert operations.

In addition to ''Black Hawk Down'' which told the story of a 1993 raid in Somalia by US Army Rangers and Delta Force teams that went disastrously awry, he has written books about the failed mission to rescue the American hostages in Iran in 1980 and the long manhunt for the Colombian drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar.

His method in those books was to combine exhaustive reporting with vivid storytelling. It helps that Bowden tends to write about historical events a long time after they take place.

The bin Laden book proved to be a very different sort of undertaking. Bowden was trying to tell the story just months after it happened. And only a small number of people - a handful of senior administration and military officials and the Navy SEALs who carried out the operation - had been privy to the events of that evening. There was no paper trail to follow; the government had classified all the documents relating to the raid, including the record of the CIA's search for bin Laden.

His book, ''The Finish,'' was published in the fall of 2012, and the story it tells is one that is by now familiar. The CIA, working in the shadows for many years, had identified a courier whom agency officers eventually traced to a large compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Agents studied this compound for months via distant satellite cameras but couldn't be certain that bin Laden was inside. If he was - a 55/45 percent proposition, Obama said later - the president did not want to let him slip away.

The safe play was to reduce the compound to dust with a bomb or missiles, but this would risk civilian casualties and also make it impossible to verify the kill with any certainty. Obama instead sent in a team of 23 Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters. The whole mission almost fell apart when one of the helicopters had to crash-land near an animal pen inside the compound. But the SEALs adapted 'on the fly' and were soon making their assault, breaching gates and doors with C-4 charges and, eventually, killing their target. Before leaving, they blew up the damaged Black Hawk. As they flew off, a giant fire raged inside the compound. The Pakistani Government was none the wiser until the SEALs were long gone.

The killing of bin Laden was not only a victory for the US military but also for the American storytelling machine, which kicked into high gear pretty much the moment the terrorist leader's dead body hit the floor.

Huge story

Last spring, Bowden got another unexpected call on his cellphone. On the other end was Seymour Hersh, the investigative reporter.

Hersh was calling to ask about the photographs of bin Laden's burial at sea - carried out, the US Government said, in accordance with Islamic custom - that Bowden had described in detail at the end of ''The Finish,'' as well as in an adaptation from the book that appeared in Vanity Fair. ''One frame shows the body wrapped in a weighted shroud,'' Bowden had written. ''The next shows it lying diagonally on a chute, feet overboard. In the next, the body is hitting the water. In the next it is visible just below the surface, ripples spreading outward. In the last frame, there are only circular ripples on the surface. The mortal remains of Osama bin Laden were gone for good.''

Hersh wanted to know: Had Bowden actually seen those photos? Bowden told Hersh that he had not. He explained that they were described to him by someone who had.

Hersh said the photographs didn't exist. Indeed, he went on, the entire narrative of how the United States hunted down and killed bin Laden was a fabrication. He told Bowden that he was getting ready to publish the real story of what happened in Abbottabad.

Bowden said he found Hersh's claims hard to believe. Hersh tried to sympathize. ''Nobody likes to get played,'' he said, adding that he meant no offense.

Political significance

It's hard to overstate the degree to which the killing of Osama bin Laden transformed American politics. From a purely practical standpoint, it enabled Obama to recast himself as a bold leader - as opposed to an overly cautious one - in advance of his 2012 re-election campaign. Strategically, the death of bin Laden allowed Obama to declare victory over Al Qaeda, giving him the cover he needed to begin phasing US troops out of Afghanistan. And it almost single-handedly redeemed the CIA, turning a decade-long failure of intelligence into one of the greatest triumphs in the history of the agency.

But bin Laden's death had an even greater effect on the American psyche. Symbolically, it brought a badly wanted moment of moral clarity, of unambiguous American valour, to a murky war defined by ethical compromise and even at times by collective shame. It completed the historical arc of the 9/11 attacks.

The first dramatic reconstruction of the raid itself - ''Getting bin Laden: What Happened That Night in Abbottabad'' - was written by a freelancer named Nicholas Schmidle and published in The New Yorker, just three months after the operation.

Bowden remained focused on Washington, taking readers inside the White House as the president navigated what would become a defining moment of his presidency. And then there was ''Zero Dark Thirty,'' which chronicled the often barbaric CIA interrogations that the agency said helped lead the United States to bin Laden's compound.

The official narrative of the hunt for and killing of bin Laden at first seemed like a clear portrait, but in effect, it was more like a composite sketch from multiple perspectives: the Pentagon, the White House and the CIA.

Great mismatch

When you studied that sketch a little more closely, not everything looked quite right. Bin Laden had not been ''engaged in a firefight,'' as the Deputy National Security Adviser, John Brennan, initially told reporters. He has been unarmed. Nor had he used one of his wives as a human shield. The president and his senior advisers hadn't been watching a ''live feed'' of the raid in the Situation Room. The operation had not been captured on helmet-cams. There were also more unsettling questions about how the whole story had been constructed.

Public officials with security clearances told reporters that the torture scenes that were so realistically depicted in ''Zero Dark Thirty'' had not in fact played any role in helping to find bin Laden.

Then there was the sheer improbability of the story, which asked people to believe that Obama sent 23 SEALs on a seemingly suicidal mission, invading Pakistani air space without air or ground cover, fast-roping into a compound that, if it even contained bin Laden, by all rights should have been heavily guarded. According to the official line, all of this was done without any sort of cooperation or even assurances from the Pakistani military or intelligence service. How likely was that?

Abbottabad is basically a garrison town; the conspicuously large bin Laden compound - three stories, encircled by an 18-foot-high concrete wall topped with barbed wire - was less than two miles from Pakistan's equivalent of West Point.

American history is filled with war stories that subsequently unravelled. Consider the Bush administration's false claims about Saddam Hussein's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. Or the imagined attack on a US vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin.

During the Bay of Pigs, the government inflated the number of fighters it dispatched to Cuba in hopes of encouraging local citizens to rise up and join them. When the operation failed, the government quickly deflated the number, claiming that it hadn't been an invasion but a modest attempt to deliver supplies to local guerrillas.

During the Iraq war, reporters informed that a mob of jubilant Iraqis toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square. Never mind that there were so few local people trying to pull the statue down that they needed the help of a US military crane. Reporters also built Pvt. Jessica Lynch into a war hero who had resisted her captors during an ambush in Iraq, when in fact her weapon had jammed and she remained in her Humvee.

Was the story of Osama bin Laden's death yet another example of American mythmaking?

Hersh theory

Within days of the bin Laden raid, Hersh told me: ''I knew there was a big story there.'' He spent the next four years, on and off, trying to get it. What he wound up publishing in May 2015 in The London Review of Books, was no incremental effort to poke a few holes in the administration's story. It was a 10,000-word refutation of the entire official narrative, sourced largely to a retired US senior intelligence official, with corroboration from two ''longtime consultants to the Special Operations Command.''

Hersh's most consequential claim was about how bin Laden was found in the first place. It was not years of painstaking intelligence-gathering, he wrote, that led the United States to the courier and, ultimately, to bin Laden. Instead, the location was revealed by a ''walk-in'' - a retired Pakistani intelligence officer who was after the US$25 million reward that the United States had promised anyone who helped locate him.

For that matter, bin Laden was hardly ''in hiding'' at all; his compound in Abbottabad was actually a safe house, maintained by the Pakistani intelligence service. When the United States confronted Pakistani intelligence officials with this information, Hersh wrote, they eventually acknowledged it was true and even conceded to provide a DNA sample to prove it.

According to Hersh's version, then, the daring raid wasn't especially daring. The Pakistanis allowed the US helicopters into their airspace and cleared out the guards at the compound before the SEALs arrived. Hersh's sources told him the United States and Pakistani intelligence officials agreed that Obama would wait a week before announcing that bin Laden had been killed in a ''drone strike somewhere in the mountains on the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.''

Killing Osama

But the president was forced to go public right away, because the crash and subsequent destruction of the Black Hawk - among the rare facts in the official story that Hersh does not dispute - were going to make it impossible to keep the operation under wraps.

As if those assertions weren't significant enough, Hersh wrote that bin Laden had not been given a proper Islamic burial at sea; the SEALs threw his remains out of their helicopter. He claimed not just that the Pakistanis had seized bin Laden in 2006, but that Saudi Arabia had paid for his upkeep in the years that followed and that the US had instructed Pakistan to arrest an innocent man who was a sometime CIA asset as the fall guy for the major in the Pakistani army who had collected bin Laden's DNA sample.

Could the bin Laden article be another major Hersh scoop?

''It's always possible,'' Bowden told me. ''But given the sheer number of people I talked to from different parts of government, for a lie to have been that carefully orchestrated and sustained to me gets into faked-moon-landing territory.''

Josh Earnest, then the White House Spokesman, said Hersh's ''story is riddled with inaccuracies and outright falsehoods.'' Col. Steve Warren, a Pentagon spokesman, said it was ''largely a fabrication.'' Critics have pointed to classified documents made public by Edward Snowden revealing a long history of CIA surveillance of the Abbottabad compound as proof that its location hadn't simply been revealed by a walk-in.

A Pentagon spokesman at the time of Abu Ghraib, Lawrence Di Rita, described one of his many (now unchallenged) articles for The New Yorker on the scandal as ''the most hysterical piece of journalist malpractice I have ever observed.''

I saw this as more of a media story, a case study in how constructed narratives become accepted truth.

''Of course there is no reason for you or any other journalist to take what was said to me by unnamed sources at face value,'' Hersh wrote. ''But it is my view that there also is no reason for journalists to take at face value what a White House or administration spokesman said on or off the record in the aftermath or during a crisis.''

In 2009, Hersh wrote a story about the growing concern among US officials that Pakistan's large nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of extremists inside the country's military. Now he let Remnick know that two of his sources - one in Pakistan, the other in Washington - were telling him something else: The administration was lying about the bin Laden operation.

One of The New Yorker's staff writers, Dexter Filkins, was already planning a trip to Pakistan for a different assignment. It paired Filkins with Hersh, asking Filkins to report the Pakistani side - in particular, the notion that Pakistan had secretly cooperated with the United States - while Hersh would keep following leads from Washington.

''It wasn't even that I was getting angry denials,'' Filkins told me. ''I was getting blank stares.'' Filkins said the mood on the ground completely contradicted Hersh's claim; the Pakistani military seemed humiliated about having been kept in the dark by the Americans.

In the meantime, The New Yorker published Schmidle's account of the bin Laden raid, and, soon after, brought Schmidle on as a staff writer.

Remnick has published some of Hersh's most provocative articles and, for that matter, plenty of other major national-security stories, that the government would have preferred to keep buried. But the bin Laden report wasn't the first one by Hersh that Remnick rejected because he considered the sourcing too thin.

In 2013 and 2014, he passed on two Hersh articles about a deadly sarin gas attack in Syria, each of which claimed the attack was not launched by the Assad regime, the presumed culprit, but by Syrian rebels, in collaboration with the Turkish Government.

Internal reports

Hersh's first Abu Ghraib article was based on an internal US army report, but many of the most important revelations in his work come from mid¬level bureaucrats, ambassadors, CIA station chiefs and four-star generals whose identities are known to only his editors and fact-checkers. It changed the course of history (in Watergate, most prominently) and helped make Hersh's illustrious career.

Hersh's instincts - to him, every story stinks from Day 1 - have served him well. But there are inherent perils in making a career of digging up the government's deepest secrets.

Hersh may have been the first journalist to write that a secret informant had steered the United States to bin Laden's compound, but he was by no means the only one who had heard this rumor. Coll was another. ''In my case, it was described to me as a specific Pakistani officer in the intelligence service,'' Coll, the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the CIA and Afghanistan, told me one afternoon in his office at Columbia. ''I even had a name that I've been working on for four years.''

Intuitively, the notion of a walk-in makes sense. Secret informants have led the United States to virtually every high-value terrorist target tracked to Pakistan, including Ramzi Yousef, the first World Trade Center bomber, and Mir Aimal Kansi, who killed two CIA employees in an attack on Langley in 1993.

''The idea that the CIA stitched this together, and torture worked and they found the car and they found the courier, found the license plate and they followed it to the house - had always seemed to those of us on the beat like it was very elaborate,'' Coll said.

From the beginning, it seemed hard to believe that high-level Pakistani officials weren't aware of bin Laden's presence in their country. Several US officials even publicly said as much in the aftermath of the raid. Pakistan conducted its own secret investigation into the matter, which was leaked to Al Jazeera in 2013. The Abbottabad Commission Report, as it was known, found no evidence that Pakistan was harboring bin Laden. Instead, it concluded that the world's most wanted man was able to move freely around the country for nine years because of widespread incompetence among military and intelligence authorities.

Pakistani complicity

The most detailed exploration of the question of Pakistani complicity in sheltering bin Laden appeared in this magazine in March 2014. It came from a book written by a Times correspondent, Carlotta Gall, who reported that a source inside the ISI told her that Pakistan's intelligence service ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden.

More controversial is Hersh's claim that Pakistan knew in advance about the SEAL team raid and allowed it to proceed, even helped facilitate it.

Logically, it would require us to accept that the US Government trusted the Pakistanis to help it kill bin Laden, and that the humiliation that Pakistan's military and intelligence reportedly felt in the aftermath of the raid was either a ruse or the product of some even deeper US-Pakistani intrigue.

Eleven days after the raid, an unbylined story appeared on GlobalPost, an American website specializing in foreign reporting, headlined: ''Bin Laden Raid: Neighbours Say Pakistan Knew.'' A half-dozen people who lived near bin Laden's compound told the reporter that plainclothes security personnel - ''either Pakistani intelligence or military officers'' - knocked on their doors a couple of hours before the raid and instructed them to turn the lights off and remain indoors until further notice.

When I contacted the chief executive of GlobalPost, Philip Balboni, he put me in touch with the reporter, Aamir Latif, a Pakistani journalist. Latif, a former foreign correspondent for US News and World Report, told me that he travelled to Abbottabad the day after bin Laden was killed and reported there for a couple of days. I asked him if he still believed that there was some level of Pakistani awareness of the raid. ''Not awareness,'' he answered instantly. ''There was coordination and cooperation.''

Latif, who kept his name off the original post because of the sensitivity of the subject in Pakistan, said that people in the area told him that they heard the US helicopters and that surely the Pakistani military had, too: ''The whole country was awake, only the Pakistani Army was asleep? What does that suggest to you?''

Gall's best guess, is that the United States alerted Pakistan to the bin Laden operation at the 11th hour. ''I have no proof, but the more I think about it and the more I talk to Pakistani friends, the more I think it's probably true that Kayani and Pasha were in on it,'' Gall told me, referring to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was then the Chief of the Army Staff, and Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, then the Director General of the ISI.

As for killing bin Laden, she said: ''The scenario I imagine is that the Americans watched him and tracked him and never told the Pakistanis because they didn't trust them. But when they decided to go ahead with the raid, I think they might have gone to Kayani and Pasha and said, 'We're going in, and don't you dare shoot down our helicopters or else.' ''

''The Pakistanis often fall back on; 'We were incompetent,' '' Gall said. ''They don't want their countrymen to know what they're playing at. They fear there will be a backlash.''

Where does the official bin Laden story stand now? For many, it exists in a kind of liminal state, floating somewhere between fact and mythology.

History as a process

Over time, many of Hersh's claims could be proved right. What then? We may be justifiably outraged. Pakistan, our putative ally in the war on terror and the beneficiary of billions of dollars in US taxpayer aid, would have provided refuge to our greatest enemy - the author of the very act that prompted us to invade Afghanistan.

But should we really be shocked by such a revelation?

After all, it would barely register on a scale of government secrecy and deception.

''White House public-affairs people are not historians, they are not scholars, they are not even journalists,'' Steven Aftergood, Director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told me. ''They are representing a political entity inside the United States Government. Telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth is not their job, and even if it were their job, they would not necessarily be able to do it.''

Reporters like to think of themselves as empiricists, but journalism is a soft science. Absent documentation, the grail of national-security reporting, they are only as good as their sources and their deductive reasoning.

''As a reporter in this world,'' Bowden told me, ''you have to always allow for the possibility that you are being lied to, you hope for good reason.''

In his 2014 memoir ''Duty,'' the former Secretary of Defense, Robert M. Gates, wrote that everyone who gathered in the White House Situation Room on the night of the raid had agreed to ''keep mum on the details.'' ''That commitment lasted about five hours,'' he added, pointing his finger directly at the White House and the CIA: ''They just couldn't wait to brag and to claim credit.''

There are different ways to control a narrative. There's the old-fashioned way: Classify documents that you don't want seen and, there's also the more modern, social-media-savvy approach: Tell the story you want them to believe.

''I love the notion that the government isn't riddled with secrecy,'' Hersh told me toward the end of our long day together. ''Are you kidding me? They keep more secrets than you can possibly think. Of course there is.''

- New York Times Magazine